Sara Teasdale

A November Night - Poem by Sara Teasdale

Autoplay next video

There! See the line of lights,A chain of stars down either side the street --Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,A necklace for my throat? I'd twist it roundAnd you could play with it. You smile at meAs though I were a little dreamy childBehind whose eyes the fairies live. . . . And see,The people on the street look up at usAll envious. We are a king and queen,Our royal carriage is a motor bus,We watch our subjects with a haughty joy. . . .How still you are! Have you been hard at workAnd are you tired to-night? It is so longSince I have seen you -- four whole days, I think.My heart is crowded full of foolish thoughtsLike early flowers in an April meadow,And I must give them to you, all of them,Before they fade. The people I have met,The play I saw, the trivial, shifting thingsThat loom too big or shrink too little, shadowsThat hurry, gesturing along a wall,Haunting or gay -- and yet they all grow realAnd take their proper size here in my heartWhen you have seen them. . . . There's the Plaza now,A lake of light! To-night it almost seemsThat all the lights are gathered in your eyes,Drawn somehow toward you. See the open parkLying below us with a million lampsScattered in wise disorder like the stars.We look down on them as God must look downOn constellations floating under HimTangled in clouds. . . . Come, then, and let us walkSince we have reached the park. It is our garden,All black and blossomless this winter night,But we bring April with us, you and I;We set the whole world on the trail of spring.I think that every path we ever tookHas marked our footprints in mysterious fire,Delicate gold that only fairies see.When they wake up at dawn in hollow tree-trunksAnd come out on the drowsy park, they lookAlong the empty paths and say, "Oh, hereThey went, and here, and here, and here! Come, see,Here is their bench, take hands and let us danceAbout it in a windy ring and makeA circle round it only they can crossWhen they come back again!" . . . Look at the lake --Do you remember how we watched the swansThat night in late October while they slept?Swans must have stately dreams, I think. But nowThe lake bears only thin reflected lightsThat shake a little. How I long to takeOne from the cold black water -- new-made goldTo give you in your hand! And see, and see,There is a star, deep in the lake, a star!Oh, dimmer than a pearl -- if you stoop downYour hand could almost reach it up to me. . . .

There was a new frail yellow moon to-night --I wish you could have had it for a cupWith stars like dew to fill it to the brim. . . .

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;They have put shawls of fog around them, see!What if the air should grow so dimly whiteThat we would lose our way along the pathsMade new by walls of moving mist recedingThe more we follow. . . . What a silver night!That was our bench the time you said to meThe long new poem -- but how different now,How eerie with the curtain of the fogMaking it strange to all the friendly trees!There is no wind, and yet great curving scrollsCarve themselves, ever changing, in the mist.Walk on a little, let me stand here watchingTo see you, too, grown strange to me and far. . . .I used to wonder how the park would beIf one night we could have it all alone --No lovers with close arm-encircled waistsTo whisper and break in upon our dreams.And now we have it! Every wish comes true!We are alone now in a fleecy world;Even the stars have gone. We two alone!